The Flowers of Childhood
The red rose bush
The white jasmines
Mulla pookkal and kudamulla pookkal
And the roadside flowers
Touch-me-nots and forget-me-nots
The smaller, the better
Whites and yellows, reds and blue
The clusters the hummingbirds came to drink honey from
With their standing-stillness-whirring wings
With my sister trying to explain to me
The names I never remembered
My mother put the love of flowers in me
Even now they remind me
Of Gray and Wordsworth simultaneously
"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen"
In forest or glade and valley and by tower
"And waste its sweetness on the desert air"
But "oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude
And then my heart," again, "with pleasure
Fills and dances with the flowers
Of my childhood and gives me peace"
Part 2 The Flowers of Ideology
My mother read me Toru Dutt
but was wiser than the poet
for she told me to love the rose,
the lily, and the lotus - all,
not to make a fight of it,
For in the world they all three live
thrive
spread their grace
and do not care that men have made
them symbols to fight with
I follow my mother and
so equality always praise.
Part 3 The Flowers of Art
The flowers of art
like the love of God
are wider, deeper, longer, broader
higher than any man can grasp
Here there's a place for all the flowers
Ophelia's sad ones and also plastic, or cloth ones
Alice's talking and acting/dancing flowers
Flowers in vases and Venus fly-traps
I want to write the Revenge of the Flowers
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
"The flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryears"
Singing ones, to put it briefly
Here flowers come into their own
Here they have their own language
Here they have not only a glossary
They have their own litany and epiphany
Painting: Vincent Van Gogh, 3 Sunflowers, Still life.
Quotes from Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray and I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by Wordsworth, sometimes popularly referred to as Daffodils.
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